I taste a liquor never brewed— by Emily Dickinson

First published: 1861, as “The May Wine”; collected in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1955

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

Emily Dickinson did not give titles to most of her poems, so they are generally referred to by their first lines. The editor of the 1955 edition of her poems, Thomas H. Johnson, attempted to number them according to the order of their composition; “I taste a liquor never brewed—” is listed as number 214. Dickinson sometimes left alternate versions of her poems, and the version discussed here is what Johnson believed to be her final one.

“I taste a liquor never brewed—” consists of four stanzas, the second and fourth lines rhyming in each quatrain. This is a poem of visionary experience in which the richness of a natural setting in summer is the cause. Speaking in her own lyric voice, Dickinson describes the exhilaration of going outdoors in summer in terms of getting drunk in a tavern.

In the first stanza, she asserts that she is drinking an unusual kind of liquor, one that has not been brewed but that is superior to the finest Rhine wine. In the second stanza, she says that she has become drunk by consuming the air and the dew of summer days. This consumption has taken place in “inns of Molten Blue,” or under the hot summer sky. In the third stanza, she claims that her capacity for this liquor exceeds that of the most dedicated of summer’s drinkers, the bees and the butterflies: When they have ceased drinking, she will continue. In the final quatrain, she affirms that she will drink until seraphs—the six-winged angels that stand in the presence of God—and saints as well run to Heaven’s windows to see her, “the little Tippler/ Leaning against the—Sun—.”

The last image of the poem, which grows out of the central comparison between drunkenness and her experiences of the summer day, humorously conveys a spiritual expansion of the self. Through this expansion, she comes to the notice of divine spirits, calling them away from their usual adoration of God in order to see this smaller god who, though perhaps a little unruly, has grown momentarily toward her true stature and importance.

Forms and Devices

Dickinson employs careful placement of pauses and an implied phrase repetition to break up what would otherwise be a steady marching rhythm. By this means, she conveys a dual sense of staggering, of the drunk losing physical control and the mystic stumbling into the presence of divinity. She makes her conventional stanza serve the unconventional, even the daring juxtaposition of drinking alcohol with nature as an inspiration of sublime perceptions.

Dickinson’s central device is the metaphor that brings together drunkenness with visionary perception. She establishes that, for her, the air and dew of summer constitute a liquor and that she is a drunkard, reeling through days that are like streets, after drinking in the inn of the sky. Therefore, she has prepared the reader for the whimsical and surprising development of this comparison in the final two stanzas.

In the third quatrain, the foxglove flower becomes the tavern of the bee. Dickinson produces fanciful humor in this comparison by inventing “landlords”—placing the word in quotation marks—who will turn the bees out of the foxgloves when they have become too drunk. She continues in this vein by speaking of butterflies that, after drinking deep, “renounce their ‘drams.’” The language of these comparisons evokes one of the many popular crusades of Dickinson’s lifetime, the temperance movement. Often, the temperance movement called for total abstinence from alcohol, and it temporarily succeeded in legally enforced abstinence with the passage of national prohibition within forty years after Dickinson’s death. By playing at opposing both abstinence and temperance, Dickinson pokes fun at the seriousness of the predominantly Protestant and conservative culture in her native Amherst, Massachusetts, where the rhetoric of temperance was familiar. This seeming irreverence extends to serious religious ideas as well.

A playful irreverence appears in the final stanza. Here, her drunken antics call to their windows not the upright citizens of the town, who might observe disdainfully the loud drunkard leaning against a lamppost in a sorry state. Instead, the observers are the angels and saints, and the tippler who they see is not leaning against something stabilizing in the street. Rather, she leans against the sun itself (capitalized for emphasis and to suggest divinity), the blazing source of summer and of the wine of the air and dew, the visible symbol of the God from whom these divine beings presumably have turned their attention in order to watch her. There is implied irreverence in making a spectacle of oneself and disturbing the heavens, but the final comparison between a mere lamppost and the sun seems to resolve this irreverence by asserting that the one who becomes drunk on summer comes ultimately to lean upon God.

The final stanza exhibits fairly clearly a technique that Dickinson used often in her poems: the implied repetition of a line or phrase. The last line of the second stanza may be implicitly the first line of the third stanza, but it is much clearer that the last line of the third stanza is implicitly repeated at the beginning of the fourth. Repeating “I shall but drink the more!” grammatically completes the lines that follow. In this way, one reads the line once to complete the third stanza and then must think it again in order to understand the beginning of the following stanza. One of the more striking uses of this technique in Dickinson’s work is at the beginning of the fourth stanza of “A Bird came down the Walk—” (poem 328), where the first line both completes the previous sentence and begins the next one.

The repeatable lines and the placement of dashes in this poem give it a spasmodic gait which parallels the drunkard’s staggering and thereby underlines the poem’s central comparison.

Bibliography

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Carruth, Hayden. “Emily Dickinson’s Unexpectedness.” Ironwood 14 (1986): 51-57.

Eberwein, Jane Donahue. An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

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Juhasz, Suzanne, ed. Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

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